Suspend payment and investigate the debt: The people have a right to know, so they don’t pay what they don’t owe.

In the midst of ongoing negotiations between the Argentine government and holders of bonds issued in foreign currencies and under foreign law, popular organizations throughout the country continue to press for stopping payments and investigating the debt`s many irregularities and illegitimacies. At the start of the struggle for independence from colonial rule, on May 25, 1810, people gathered in the main square of Buenos Aires to demand to know what was happening. It is with that historical reference that today we assert the right to know so as to stop paying what the people do not owe.

Suspend payment and investigate the debt: The people have a right to know, so they don’t pay what they don’t owe.The ongoing negotiations clearly show that economic, financial, political, and media power is aligned in naturalizing and defending the need to “honor” and pay the alleged “debt”.

The majority of private funds and speculators have not accepted the restructuring proposal presented by the government and endorsed by the IMF. They intend to extract greater concessions to further increase their profits, even in this critical context. The government is on the way to giving in. All these sectors in dispute (IMF, Investment Funds, Government) agree that the debt should be paid and that it should be a closed book. Despite the irregularities, the strong delegitimization of the debt and the historical moment of pandemic and world economic crisis.

We do not accept that paying is the only option. Our priority is peoples’ lives and that of nature. What they are demanding that we pay has never been for our benefit, but rather responds to an exacerbated exploitation, speculation and plundering that undermines our rights and sovereignty. The Argentine people know, as do so many other peoples who face the same system of perpetual debt, that it is they who are made to pay that cost with hunger, misery, contamination and repression and that, nevertheless, the more they pay the more is owed.

It is often argued that default must be avoided in order not to lose access to international financing. But Argentina has not had access to such financing since 2018, nor will it have such for some time to come, the Minister of Economy has affirmed, even if an agreement is reached with the speculators.

We maintain that it is necessary to suspend payments and investigate the debt claimed so as not to pay what the people do not owe and be able to open up other paths. We have the right to know if it is legitimate and legal, or a fraudulent and odious debt as has been so often denounced, even by the Argentine courts. On these principles we base our rejection of the alleged debt as a whole, and the campaign for the suspension of all payments and a comprehensive audit with citizen participation.

It is a matter of thinking about the debt problem in a sovereign way; of questioning a hegemonic sense that benefits the lenders of the debt and those who benefited from it, but that was not in exchange for any benefit either for the Nation or for the people. This, moreover, knowing that it would be an impossible burden to pay. More than a debt, it is a swindle that only served for capital flight, speculation, corruption and austerity, increasing public debt claims by almost 100 billion dollars during the four years of Mauricio Macri’s administration and further aggravating the cycle that began in 1975/76.

The current situation, where the pandemic has exacerbated an economic and social crisis that penalizes the working class and the people as a whole, is sufficient reason to sustain, in terms of sovereignty and social justice, the necessity and urgency of suspending all payments, investigating the debt and putting an end to the squandering of available foreign currency on the payment of an illegitimate, illegal and odious debt. Because every dollar that goes into the coffers of the IMF – such as the payment of 320 million dollars that was made last May 7, in the midst of the quarantine – , the Paris Club and other international financial institutions or speculative funds such as Blackrock, Fidelity, Pimco, Templeton, Greylock and others, is a cutback in investment in essential public policies to guarantee basic rights such as health, housing, food, water, employment, pensions, against gender violence, among others that would allow urgent needs to be covered. The debt is with the people.